Arianna Huffington: We Have Defined Success The Wrong Way

Kevin Newman Live

Somewhere between the dialogues of Ancient Greece and today’s hyper-connected age, we have defined success the wrong way, says Arianna Huffington, chair, president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group.

“My compatriots, Greek philosophers, used to talk about ‘What is a good life?’—and somehow, a good life became equated with money and power,” Huffington told CTV’s Kevin Newman via satellite.

The media mogul spoke candidly on Kevin Newman Live, sharing career lessons and the story of how a work-related injury influenced her path to become one of the most influential voices in America.

In 2007, two years after the launch of The Huffington Post, Arianna fainted from exhaustion, broke her cheekbone, and suffered a nasty gash to her right eye. Despite the severity of the injury, Arianna took it as a moment of clarity.

“It was my wake-up call about how I was living my life, about how much of my life was fueled by burnout and sleep deprivation,” she said.

In 2013, The Huffington Post launched Third Metric, an initiative to redefine success beyond money and power to shift focus on a person’s well-being, wisdom, wonder, compassion and giving. In its Canadian edition, the Screen Sense series was conceived to propel a dialogue about reevaluating our attachment to digital devices.

So, how did Huffington become an “apostle” for digital detoxes while running a business “all about being plugged in”? It’s all about balance and common sense, she explained.

“When we have employees who are bringing their best selves to work, who’ve had some time to recharge, sleep well, etcetera, everything’s going to be better for The Huffington Post.”

On being asked about who’s wisdom has made the most significant impact on her life, the answer came immediately: her mom.

“My mother was my ultimate symbol of wisdom because she knew how to be in the moment, and she knew how to let the thoughts about the future, and fears about the future get in the way.”

Huffington, who launched a new WorldPost edition in partnership with the Berggruen Institute on Governance on Tuesday, is scheduled to publish her fourteenth book “Thrive” in March.

Also on HuffPost

How Meditation Can Train Your Mind To Do The Impossible

Meditation can change the brain's structure and functioning.(01 of05)

Neuroscientist Richard J. Davidson's groundbreaking research on Tibetan Buddhist monks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has found that years of meditative practice can dramatically increase neuroplasticity -- the brain's ability to use new experiences or environments to create structural changes. For example, it can help reorganize itself by creating new neural connections."The findings from studies in this unusual sample... suggest that, over the course of meditating for tens of thousands of hours, the long-term practitioners had actually altered the structure and function of their brains," Davidson wrote in IEEE Signal Processing Magazine in 2008. (credit:Getty)

It can alter visual perception and attention.(02 of05)

In 2005, researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia and University of California at Berkeley traveled to India to study 76 Tibetan Buddhist monks, in order to gain insight into how mental states can affect conscious visual experiences -- and how we might be able to gain more control over the regular fluctuations in our conscious state.Their data indicated that years of meditation training can profoundly affect a phenomenon known as "perceptual rivalry," which takes place when two different images are presented to each eye -- the brain fluctuates, in a matter of seconds, in the dominant image that is perceived. It is thought to be related to brain mechanisms that underly attention and awareness. When the monks practiced meditating on a single object or thought, significant increases in the duration of perceptual dominance occurred. One monk was able to maintain constant visual perception for 723 seconds -- compared to the average of 2.6 seconds in non-meditative control subjects.The researchers concluded that the study highlights "the synergistic potential for further exchange between practitioners of meditation and neuroscience in the common goal of understanding consciousness." (credit:Getty)

You can expand your capacity for happiness.(03 of05)

Brain scans revealed that because of meditation, 66-year-old French monk Matthieu Ricard, an aide to the Dalai Lama, has the largest capacity for happiness ever recorded. You can read about Ricard's experience with meditation in his book, L'art de Meditation ("The Art of Meditation"), a number one best seller in France. University of Wisconsin researchers, led by Davidson, hooked up 256 sensors to his head, and found that Ricard had an unusually large propensity for happiness and reduced tendency toward negativity, due to neuroplasticity.“It’s a wonderful area of research because it shows that meditation is not just blissing out under a mango tree but it completely changes your brain and therefore changes what you are,” said Ricard.Davidson also found that when Ricard was meditating on compassion, his brain produced gamma waves "never reported before in the neuroscience literature." (credit:Getty)

Your empathy can increase.(04 of05)

Research at Stanford University's Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education made some incredible findings last year. Neuroeconomist Brian Knutson hooked up several monks' brains to MRI scanners to examine their risk and reward systems. Ordinarily, the brain's nucleus accumbens experiences a dopamine rush when you experience something pleasant -- like having sex, eating a slice of chocolate cake, or finding a $20 bill in your pocket. But Knutson's research, still in the early stages, is showing that in Tibetan Buddhist monks, this area of the brain may be able to light up for altruistic reasons."There are many neuroscientists out there looking at mindfulness, but not a lot who are studying compassion," Knutson told the San Francisco Chronicle. "The Buddhist view of the world can provide some potentially interesting information about the subcortical reward circuits involved in motivation."Davidson's research on Ricard and other monks also found that meditation can produce powerful changes in the brain regarding compassion. When the monks were asked to meditate on "unconditional loving-kindness and compassion," their brains generated powerful gamma waves that may have indicated a compassionate state of mind, Wired reported in 2006. This suggests, then, that empathy may be able to be cultivated by "exercising" the brain through loving-kindness meditation. (credit:Shuttershock)

Meditation can help you to achieve a state of oneness.(05 of05)

Buddhist monks can achieve a harmony between themselves and the world around them by breaking the psychological wall of self/other, expressed as by particular changes in the neural networks of experienced meditation practitioners, the BBC reported.While a normal brain switches between the extrinsic network (which is used when people are focused on tasks outside themselves) and the intrinsic network, which involves self-reflection and emotion -- the networks rarely act together. But Josipovic found something startling in the brains of some monks and experienced meditators: They're able to keep both networks active at the same time during meditation, allowing them to feel a sense of "nonduality," or oneness. (credit:Getty)

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Arianna Huffington: We Have Defined Success The Wrong Way

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